Sadwater Drug
by CampionSayn
Summary: A year before Hiccup met Toothless and on one of the nights that the Berserkers come to Berk to sign the peace treaty again, Dagur does something he actually-factually-very-much-so regrets, even though his intentions at the time were to either have a good laugh or get into a REAL fight with Hiccup the Useless. Written for Astrid Goes For A Spin.


Title: Sadwater Drug  
Summary: A year before Hiccup met Toothless and on one of the nights that the Berserkers come to Berk to sign the peace treaty again, Dagur does something he actually-factually-very-much-so regrets, even though his intentions at the time were to either have a good laugh or get into a REAL fight with Hiccup the Useless. Written for Astrid Goes For A Spin.  
Dedication: Written, technically, for **Astrid Goes For a Spin**, because I loved the work put into the fic '_Berserk'_ and couldn't get the images out of my head. Then I stumbled onto old Viking mythology and watched a bit of Elementary after reading Neil Gaiman and voila, you have this. Don't spear me.

* * *

_-:-  
He realized courage doesn't last very long.  
-It Never Happened, by Marc Cohen._

* * *

It was perhaps not the smartest thing Dagur had ever done in his life and he knew that if Stoick caught him and the little runt at the moment then Dagur's father would never let him hear the end of it from the point they all loaded back onto the ships after the peace treaty signing and well into after the Berserkers got back to their island. If he let up at all there was a tiny possibility that he might hear his son say that he was doing it for the good of relations and to help the squirt earn more respect if he ever did become chief (_what a difficulty it was not to laugh, long winded and wicked, at that very thought_) of Berk.

Thank Thor that when Dagur's hopes didn't seem to go the way he had intended when he'd given Hiccup the special drink most Berserkers drank easily every time they went into war or even into training, the older boy dragged Hiccup into the woods and deep into a small cove Hiccup had shown him the year before (_much to his own regret, seeing as when the two went swimming, Dagur couldn't resist staying under the water long enough to make Hiccup think he'd drowned and then yanked the brunette under the water for his own delight to observe him struggle and gasp and let go of so many bubbles of air that Dagur might have thought him a dying fish if he had been on the surface_) so he could cruise through…well, being high for the first time, it appeared.

Admittedly, as he sat comfortable and ready to assist (assist, not help; never would he _**help**_ the pipsqueak) on top of a rock that looked similar to the head of a Nadder, but with the color and texture one would get from a Gronkle, Dagur was both extremely intrigued and disturbed by the effects the herbal drink Hiccup had taken were having on the younger boy.

_("I'm not so sure this is a good idea," Hiccup repeated for what felt like the millionth time with that whiney voice Dagur could really only tolerate in small doses at a time; his little hands with small nicks and burns from the forge gripping the pint Dagur had forced onto him with conviction and the promise that on Berserk Island all the kids drank it and got bigger and stronger within the immediate future, "My dad never mentioned this and he's tried everything to make me more than…well, all of this."_

_The pointing at himself wasn't really important at this point in their knowing each other since they were little and their dads signing the treaty for years, but Dagur still found it amusing enough to smile and show his strangely white teeth._

_"Well, he's only tried all the things you people of Berk have available, obviously," Dagur insisted, sipping at his own drink that smelled and looked and tasted exactly like what Hiccup was to drink—a magician needs to be convincing if he's going to perform a magic trick—but lacked a certain little white powder ingredient that Dagur had slipped in with the flick of his hand and a little trick of the eye he had been perfecting since he'd decided he was going to try this on Hiccup months before the treaty needed to be signed again, "And you don't the ingredients for the drug here. It herbs you can only get on Berserk.")_

Dagur had lied to the boy, of course and he would likely find that out if one of the other teens came looking around and found the boy as he was at the moment, skittering around close to what shade there was in the cove with the sun closer towards the west and his eyes turning black-black-black from the drug so that they caught whatever light there was anyway and it made him pound the heels of his hands onto his eyelids. The teens that weren't kept in the forge to stay out of trouble and out of the way would know that Hiccup had taken the powdered remnants of some herb that looked like a weed with little seeds black as Hiccup's pupils and just as big, mixed with root paste and dried spices; all of which wasn't really allowed on Berk unless there was a war going on around them that was worse than what they faced with dragons every other day.

A crow flew out from the trees above their heads and gave a caw that to Dagur wasn't so bad, almost like the birds back on his island, but to Hiccup—and this Dagur knew from experience the first time he'd taken the drink himself—it must have been like having a Monstrous Nightmare breathing directly into his ear, because he cried out like a rabbit that had been shot in the leg, bone snapped, with a heavy rock and bolted over closer to the large rock Dagur was perched on; he was mumbling words and sentences Dagur couldn't understand again.

"Around and up and down… It's in the centermost output of fire and light and if I could just get that rope, now that would do the trick—steelworks under the stairs in deep in the earth… lightning, lightning, lightning—why isn't it ever good enough?!"

The brunette was starting to take his clothes off now—a side-effect of the drug being unusual heat under the skin and the mouth drying up like a bone in ice—and Dagur removed his helmet in case he had to get off of the rock when (there was no question of IF in this situation; there never was and there never would be) Hiccup took a dive into the pond and Dagur would have to wade in and drag him out. Whether or not Dagur would have to drag Hiccup out like a floppy lamb or they would actually start a fight soon wasn't known to the older boy, but for once, he was hoping Hiccup would just stay really still.

There was this weird feeling in Dagur's gut that if Hiccup actually tried to fight, then there was a small-insignificant-miniscule chance that Dagur himself would get hurt.

He hadn't realized that Hiccup kept his fingernails longer than most men and Dagur loosely rubbed the still fresh and bleeding trail of markings Hiccup had left on Dagur's wrists when the Berserker pulled Hiccup into the cove. It seemed touching Hiccup as he was at the moment was tantamount to trying to reign in a wild cat of some kind and Dagur didn't look forward to having to explain away the markings only a woman would leave behind in a fight (_the smile of thinking of Hiccup as more feminine than most didn't last long as Hiccup started undoing the buckle of his belt_) to get away.

The older boy groaned and scratched his tied and fire-red hair as Hiccup did away with everything but his undershift (_by the gods he was skinny and frail looking with his clothes, but without them he looked like something fragile and easy to break with a single wrong move in the wrong direction—how did he ever in all his life think he'd be able to fight dragons one day?—with ribs that moved and were easy to count, skin tight and probably easy to bruise by the look of the still healing impact bruise in shades of brown and green along his hip, coloring that wasn't healthy for any sort of Viking and knobby joints that seemed more feminine than even the Hofferson and Thorston girls_) and starting wading into the pond. The blood in him seemed to move directly to either where the water was cooling what it touched along his feet then ankles then knees then finally stopping at the hip, or towards everything above his elbows.

Dagur focused directly on the middle of Hiccup's back where it seemed the blood in him would not go—too busy on both of his ends to pay any attention to his middle that was white as a dying silver bass—for all the world and found himself calling out, "Don't you dare put any of that water in your mouth! I don't need you puking all over me when I drag you back to your house. You're already going to be soaking wet and practically naked, I don't need anything worse, Haddock."

Even if Hiccup was high out of his gourd he didn't dare defy the voice behind him, hands instead folding themselves over both of his shoulders and digging his own nails into them until his fingers went nearly as white as his stomach.

He was such a pathetic sight.

"I am never giving you that drink again," Dagur said more to himself than to Hiccup, but still indeed meant for Hiccup because his voice carried and Hiccup looked at him with those blackening eyes and looked like he was going to cry for a reason Dagur couldn't fathom because on Berserk everyone that took the drug got angry or violent or extremely happy or just stood looking at a single object for hours thinking it was the most beautiful thing in the world (_Dagur thanked Thor and Loki and whichever other God was involved in drugs that Dagur was one of the more violent participants and not one who had a complete intake of beauty; that would be awkward on so many levels_) before every single category burned out and just went back to being their own Viking selves.

"Y-you…"

Dagur blinked as Hiccup tried to choke out words through his totally raw throat, that dry feeling making everything worse, Dagur knew, "I what?"

"You said this would work… did you lie? Were you lying all along?"

The Berserker was tempted to tell the truth straight out like he would any other time but at that moment Hiccup's body was being rather traitorous and sentimental and his eyes were leaking sadwater that slid along his thin face and dripped into the freshwater of the pond with little sounds Dagur couldn't even hear from his seat on the rock. Hiccup wasn't really crying, no sounds of sorrow coming out of him like a dying person, but Dagur held enough knowledge to know that if he said the truth right at that moment, then Hiccup would indeed start crying—or try and kill him, but that would be something more preferable for Dagur to wish for, so he knew he wouldn't get it at the moment.

So, he lied. It wasn't hard and Dagur knew a lie would live for a lesser amount of time than the truth in the mind of a drugged person, so he just winged it.

"No, Hiccup, I wouldn't lie about hoping you would actually…get something out of this. I suppose I might have given you the wrong drink, is all this is. Don't worry so much about it."

Hiccup blinked at him like a dying kitten and Dagur slid off of his rock when the brunette swayed a little where he stood in the water, surprise lacing up the Berserker's insides when Hiccup actually started leaking even more sadwater, but with no sniffles and even less emotion when he spoke up again.

"Oh. I just thought… maybe if you weren't lying I'd finally get to do something right. Turn into something with beefy arms like dad keeps hoping I'll get even though I know I won't and I guess… he and everyone else will just keep giving me that look with the scowl and the shake of the head all the time."

Okay, now they were heading into emotional depths that Dagur and no other Viking on Earth was comfortable with, so he took off his boots and folded up his shirt and pant lengths to just above his elbows and knees, nodding absently and grumbling under his breath about using Hiccup as a target the next day if he didn't stop talking in that totally dead way very soon.

"I'm sure it's not that bad, pipsqueak. You're Stoick the Vast's son; at least they can't throw things at you."

"Sure they can," Hiccup stated, but didn't defend, as Dagur started treading into the water towards him and the runt waded further away from the Berserker; neither were going towards the pond's center, but more in a circle with Hiccup tripping occasionally on things below the surface (_water weeds and dead fish clung to him and his face his the water a couple of times as a result, but he always came back up after a moment; each impact made Dagur jerk further more quickly as a result_) and Dagur tried to block out the words that kept slipping out of his mouth.

"I mean, not all of them actually do it. Mostly just Tuffnut and Snotlout when they have nothing else to do and I wander outside my house on my day off from the forge. It's not as bad as when we were little with the rocks and sticks, but they do still throw things at me."

Hiccup tripped again on something under the water, but before his face splashed into the water, Dagur finally yanked on his arm and Hiccup found himself limp and being carried back to land like a sack of potatoes. The Berserker looked contemplative, but Hiccup just thought that looked funny until he laughed and then something clicked in his head (_laughter was bad, a negative reaction to things he meant in good will but always ended up making into something on the negative end of the spectrum and it was bad, bad, bad, bad-!)_ and his teeth clicked together when his jaw snapped shut.

That action caused Dagur to snort in amusement for about a moment and a half before Hiccup felt both of his fists clench, unclench, clench again and then found himself slamming both fists into Dagur's backside so hard that Dagur cried out in surprise (_hard as Hiccup was hitting, it wasn't hard enough to hurt a Berserker as strong as Dagur; if anything the sound was made only because Dagur hadn't been expecting the feeling_) and almost dropped Hiccup into the water two feet from solid ground. If he had actually dropped the teen, Hiccup would have landed in the little foot high amount of much and water reeds, colored himself dark black and brown and possibly hit his head on one of the rocks poking out of the water.

"The Hel is your problem?" Dagur growled as Hiccup continued trying and failing to land a blow to his backside in a way that would actually hurt the redhead.

"Don't laugh at me! You don't live here, you don't get to laugh at me like everyone else does! I hate being laughed at!"

Another crow and then two more from where it came from in the high trees with the dark foliage flew out at Hiccup's yelling, wings buffeting the air and their heavy cawing breaching into Hiccup's ears just enough to make him stop pounding on Dagur and clutch at his head and ears in pain that was entirely and then not so entirely because of the drugs still circulating around and through all of his faculties that mattered to the senses.

Dagur felt the water from Hiccup's undershift soak into his own clothing as Hiccup breathed hard and heavy from his spot on his shoulder, but he didn't seem to pay much attention to the discomfort as the hand that wasn't clutching Hiccup started picking up the clothing the younger teen had dropped in his haste to be rid of the heat that the drug was venting through him; trying to keep his focus on something mundane and ordinary and not this brutal honesty that Hiccup revealed once his sarcasm and tough act was rented and stripped away by the trick Dagur had thought and hoped would be far more amusing. Hiccup's clothes fit easily into Dagur's one hand, like it was only the amount a child would wear; discomforting as Hiccup sagged on his shoulder and his breathing started becoming less of what it had been for the last two hours.

"I wasn't laughing at you…"

But Hiccup couldn't hear him. He'd finally passed out and Dagur knew that as sure as he knew, leaving that cove and slowly making his way back to the Haddock house (_where he would sneak in through a window and stuff Hiccup into his bed like it was the one thing—the one and only thing—he was supposed to do for the day before sneaking back out through the window and up to the feast being held for the Berserker visitors to eat something before he went back to their ship and passed out in his own exhaustion,)_ that he'd never, ever, ever give Hiccup another drugged drink as long as they both lived.

Really, this wasn't as funny as he thought it would be and it would be just… pointless and exhausting to do it again.


End file.
